A non-cryptozoological trip to Redditch

You should all have by now read Ross’ turn of events regarding last Sunday’s auction. Now, I am not going to attempt to pretend that this was a purely cryptozoological trip, far from it; it was a chance for those who went to get their hands on some great new fish. Ross wanted to get his tanks started with something attractive, but easy to keep; Jon wanted anything with a sp. “something” at the end of its name; Emma wanted some fish for her community tanks; and I wanted both anything with sp. “something” (this means that this certain fish has not been scientifically described, but it is probably from the genus before the “sp.” part. So, Cryptoheros sp. "Honduran red point" relates to an undiscribed cichlid from the Cryptoheros genus, probably from Honduras) and something to sit with a couple of other medium sized cichlids in a 3ft tank opposite my chair to entertain me.

After paying the rather high entry fee, we were given a load of free tubs of food, which we worked out as being worth about £5 more than the entry ticket, so I wasn’t too disappointed. After a quick general meeting (which none of our party had much to say, we were not members), we listened to a talk by Bernd Degen, a Discus breeder and show master for over 30 years. He talked about first showing Discus (with some great photos of the massive Japanese shows) and some of the techniques people use to get that “perfect” discus, then he moved on to a talk about keeping discus in a planted aquarium, something I have always advocated.

After a break, the auction began. The first lot was exactly what I wanted, a 4” male Nandopsis salvini, a medium sized predatory cichlid from Guatemala. This is a stunning fish not that often seen in the shops. When it is, it is usual £5+ for a juvenile about 1-2” long. My male over 8 times that size for £8 was a bargain.

From then on in, our table ended up buying about12-15 lots of fish; I cannot even remember what we got! Emma got hold of her community angelfish and an unusual species of Corydoras catfish, Jon got his beloved Rams (at about half the cost of buying from a shop, and better quality) as well as Aequidens sp. “Peru” (a nice smallish cichlid, similar to the hobby staple the Blue Acara, see top photo); whilst Ross ended up with another undiscribed species (Krobia sp. “red cheek” if you are interested) and various other fish to fill his tanks up with. I got myself a group of Thorichthys sp. 'Mixteco Blue' (see bottom photo) which are currently sat in Jon’s local the Farmer’s Arms. These cost me about £3 for 8 youngsters. This is just plain stupid!

Following from the excitement of the auction, we had Alf Stalsberg, a writer and traveller who was speaking about Aequidens sp. “Silver Saum”. Time for taxonomic cock up! Aquarists may well have heard of a fish called a “Green Terror” (why? Because they are generally a metallic green, and are seriously aggressive). Now, this was thought to be a species called Aequidens rivulatus. This was debunked a good few years back, and the hobby’s fish is now known as A. sp. “Gold Saum” because of the gold edges to the fins. A. sp. “Silver Saum” is very similar, but has silver edges to the fins. Stalsberg went out to collect these fish, and found that these three cichlids represented different species. Now, the Americans (his words not mine!) “walked in and think they know everything!” and said that this was rubbish, A. rivulatus was the species in the hobby, and the others were just geographical variants. Well, says Stalsberg, do variants of a species occurring in the same river system breed only with fish with their own colour edging? No says he, they would all breed together. The fact they he has witnessed a separate breeding divide in the wild proves that they are different species. I for one feel that this argument will carry on for a long time...

After a quick raffle, we went home again to get the fish into their new aquaria. The traffic was terrible and I for one got back about an hour later than expected, but hey, if this is the price to pay for such a superb day, then I would gladly do it again.

SCORP STORY

I have a thing for arthropods. I had guessed that you, dear reader, had already grasped that fact, but just to reiterate it, here is the funny tale of just one of Britain’s top tiny pond predators, the common water scorpion.

First, a little taxomony. Water scorpions are insects (ED: no, really Max? Tell us something we don’t know) from the family Hemiptera. A colloquial name for most small insects is a “bug”, but this name is actually the common name for the Hemiptera. Hemiptera are called so because they have two pair of wings, the front of which is very thick and serves as a sort of armour. Hemi= half, ptera=wing. Get it?

As well as the wing thing, bugs are distinguished by having an incomplete life cycle (where the young pass through stages of being nymphs before full adulthood, just like cockroaches, Phasmids, grasshoppers and mantids) and sucking mouthparts. They are known as a “primitive” order because they have an incomplete life cycle, but they still have more than 60,000 species described, more than any other primitive order. They are infact the only inscts to be found in the open ocean (a funny group of water striders, you know, the funny fellows which sit on top of the water in your pond in summer). Some common bugs (other than those mentioned) include: assassin bugs, leaf/stink bugs, backswimmers and leaf-footed bugs.

Water scorpions come from the family Nepidae, which is very similar to the family Belostomatidae, or the giant water bugs. They both fullfill very similar niches in their environment: highly cryptic ambush predators who stalk the upper reaches of ponds, lakes and streams. Both families are always a shade of brown (kinda hard to look like a dead leaf if you are not brown) with large and very stong raptorial front legs. With these they grab onto prey before injecting them with a cocktail of venom and digestive juices, and then sucking out the mush. There are two species of water scorpion in British waters, the common (the short fat fellow) and the stick (the long thin one). I have never seen a stick water scorpion, but the other day I found my first common waterscorpion for about a dozen years.

I am currently wrighting a huge piece of Geology coursework. To avoid it killing me, I try to get out every day if I can. On Friday, I decided to go out to a local garden centre or two to have a look around. Now, thanks to some interesting benefits of competition which I am not going to discuss here, in one place on my route there are two large garden centers right next to each other. In front of the larger one there lie a couple of large ponds. I have never bothered to look at these before, but seeing as I walked right passed one on my way to the other garden centre, I had to take a look. It must have been about 35ft long, 8ft wide, but only 1.5ft deep. There was thick reed growth, but oddly, no other aquatic plants. This made it great for looking into, and in about 3 seconds, I had seen my first newt of the day. A possibly smooth, possibly palmate female. This was followed by about 15 more, so I got bored of looking for newts, and mumbled to myself: “Ooo, this would make prefect water scorpion habitat”. I looked, but to no avail.

Until I moved to a different side of the pond and immediately found one. I was slightly surprised; I have said “Ooo, this would make prefect water scorpion habitat” to myself more times than I can remember, but never seen one, so I thanked the giant water bugs in the sky, and began the tricky process of getting the beggar to walk onto a reed stem so that I could pin it down with another piece and transport it back to the car...

In which I had a plastic bag filled with water and some small snails I had got (for free) from the garden centre. There was nothing for it, I had to take my new fiend home with me in this bag. So I did so.

He is currently sat in a small tub on my desk, and I have managed to persuade him to eat a dead baby cockroach, which bodes well for his future life in captivity. He is living with some small snails and is doing rather well. A handy thing about water scorpions is that they don’t have gills, instead relying on a pair of tubes coming out of their back end to reach up out of the water and breathe. This means they can easily acclimatise to different waters (temperature still remains an issue however) and thus they can settle down in captivity very easily.

What I would really like to have now is a couple of giant water bugs. Forget the inch that my water scorpion is, the larger giant water bugs get to over 4 inches, tha largest even hits 6”, making them easily able to make a meal of newts, fish and very large fat snails. What has this got to do with cryptozoology? Could a giant water bug/water scorpion account for sightings of a huge aggressive preadator that lives in the congo and has been known to take down hippos? Err, no. This story has nothing to do with cryptozoology. But hey, I bet you all learnt something from that tale did you not?